Good points. I'm not much of an expert in these matters, but my hunch is the history of the west vs. east communists might have something to do with it.
Czechoslovakia had a 20-year spell of democracy between the two world wars. It was actually rather inventive in that (if I recall correctly) it was the first nation to introduce pensions or unemployment insurance or both. So there was some lingering nostalgia for those times. Whereas Ukraine and Belarus never had that experience.
And I think those former communist nations that have forged closer ties to the west have also brought in more western values to help their versions of western democracy work a little better.
According to Marek and my other anecdotal readings, the communism in Czechoslovakia was fairly democratic. The party leaders worked their way up the ranks, earning the trust and respect of their comrades. I doubt things were that rosy; even western democracies have their players trying to manipulate outcomes for personal advantage.
On the other side of the divide, elections and direction were often rigged from the top. The politburo ensured their kind of people were at the bottom, so as to not upset the top leadership. This rigging started almost immediately after the communists had control of USSR. Lenin didn't seem to like the kind of democracy he had created. Stalin leveraged the authoritarianism into something worse. The softer communist nations adopted some of these tendencies.
In 1992, my faction of the Canadian political party I had been working for lost an internal election. We were put on the sidelines. With a little time to think with clearer head, I realized that all parties were structured for the benefit of the party, not society. Somehow I invented another system of governance.
Later I found myself in Czechoslovakia. I was there for its Velvet Divorce. Little by little, I was acquiring a better understanding of communism.
I was rather amazed that the electoral structure in an "ideal" communist party was pretty much structured like my democratic invention: tiered indirect elections, where one tiers votes for next highest tier. Vladimir Lenin had invented a structure similar to mine. I probably made a lot of sense to people when he was in exile, which helped spawn small communist movements around the world. But when it came to time to put it into practice in the USSR, he forgot what he was preaching about it.
The early Christian church and American Constitution were also tiered, indirect elections. The Church morphed into a top-down approach after the Council of Nicea in 325. The USA went for a populist approach, which was completed with the 17th amendment.
But it is interesting that when thinkers are free to design a new system, they have come up with tiered indirect elections as the means to elect to elect political leaders. I am not the "inventor" of this system.
Tiered indirect elections are the solution to a better future governance. But I have taken the lessons from the historical failures and realized that we cannot implement this system overnight. New skills and attitudes need to be learned. We will need at least a decade to put together a working model.
Again, I invite to read my book. It takes about three hours. It is a free read from my website.
